Mental Illness is a harsh reality many teens face – I choose to face it head on.

Menu

Tag Archives: death

She looked into the mirror on the wall of her bedroom and groaned. It didn’t matter what anyone said, all she could hear was the hissing of her own internal dialog like an old scratched up 45 record. It skipped and jumped and came back to the same snarled and garbled up lines over and over again. “UgLy, FAT, pAtheTic, UseLeSs.”

A tear trickled down her freckled cheek and followed the trail of mascara that had left tire tracks down each side of her face. The perfect complexion that everyone saw was in her eyes fiercely marred. With red blotches spotting up her creamy skin, she looked like a freak. No one understood what it was like. All it took was one second of her heart racing fast and the blotches would appear. She wouldn’t even know it was there if it weren’t for the heat of her skin against her frozen like fingers.

With the palm of her hand she began to rub at the black marks on her face and she slowly increased the pressure. The friction of the rubbing became hot against her face first, then her hand. She rubbed harder and harder till her face was burning. With both her hands she tore into both sides of her face and she rubbed at her skin till it began to roll like crumbs under her fingers. The pain was like a welcome visitor and she embraced it completely.

She wanted to just scream, or rage at her own reflection, but that wouldn’t fix anything. The girl in the mirror was not some impostor. It was really her. She hated the face before her. She began to cry and the tears came faster and faster.

She pulled back the curtains that hung around the bottom of her loft bed and climbed into her chair. She closed them back tightly and they held the world at bay. She sunk into her chair further and let the tears take over. Sobs silently wracked her tiny body.

A wave of despair washed over her. Nothing would ever change and she felt so hopeless she felt as if she were sinking into a big dark hole. She was overwhelmed and all her senses began to buzz. Tears, from a never ending supply, continued down her face. Her whole body shook and a loud moan escaped her lips. It surprised her, yet made her cry harder.

She no longer even truly remembered how she got to where she was now, all she knew was she was drowning and gasping for air. It was as if she were dying. She could hardly take a breath in and couldn’t push any air out. The darkness that she had sought out now seemed to be pushing on her, weighing her down.

Now, at this point, every time, the trigger that brought her to this place no longer mattered. All that mattered was that she had arrived. She was now here, and she feared there was no leaving. All she could think of was escape, and for her mind, there was only one way out of this cycle of hell… death. She craved it and that scared her beyond words.

She began sobbing with a low moan and increasing wails. She watched herself from a place outside her own body. She knew what came next, and she was powerless to stop it. The coming panic attack would consume her and leave her exhausted. She began to cry harder, angry that she couldn’t stop what she knew was coming, livid that she didn’t even remember why she was upset to begin with, and even more incensed that she didn’t even want to stop, to be honest.

She was crazy. She hated herself and she hated every inch of of that which made her up. And yes, she was even mad at the one who made her. Because if God makes all of us, why wasn’t SHE “fearfully and wonderfully made,” like everyone else? Why did he make her like THIS? She could see no good point, and if there was one, to her being like this, and she wanted no part of it. All she wanted was to slowly evaporate, disappear, or to fade into nothing.

But here she sat, still, and she was not evaporating. A low and painful wail escaped her lips and she let her emotions fully take over her mind and body. Rocking back and forth, she stopped fighting it and gave into it and let it take her. What was the point in fighting it? She let it full consume her.

Afterall…

Nothing would ever change.

Ever.

(This is a narrative written by Christi, Lindsey’s mom. It is all real, as things here always will be, of a regularly occurring situation for Linds. She worked together with me to get the feelings and the emotions of the moment down so that hopefully readers can step, for a moment, inside her mind for a moment and see life from her perspective.)